Online Casinos that Accepting Skrill

If you want to play slot machines (or roulette, poker, or baccarat or any other gambling game) online you can do so now, without signing a damn thing or giving anyone a single personal detail about your life. Otherwise, you’ll need a Skrill casino account to easily fund your Skrill online casino account. Honestly, try it. Just search for “demo version” with your favourite title and you’ll probably be able to play everything from Starburst to Blackjack. But that’s not the point for most of us. The biggest jump start to the history of Internet gambling wasn’t the invention of the web, it was the invention of a way of sending money, instantaneously online. Because that’s what gambling is all about. Initially, the method of getting money to a casino could be much older than the internet: basically, you used your bank account. But today’s online casino gambler has a lot more choice. They can send money instantly all around the world. And get it paid back to them too. Because that’s the other thing gambling is all about: winning! This is where Skrill casino gambling comes in, and this is our Skrill online casino guide to using this very up-to-date online payment system.

What is Skrill?

Skrill is an online wallet – or an e-wallet, or a payment processor… Which immediately leads us to ask, what is an online wallet, or a digital wallet, or a payment processing system? The idea is older than the Internet, and a lot older than the online gambling explosion. The most famous of these systems is PayPal. But there are others, and they offer slightly different experiences, and crucially, have different reputational value – and when you’re trusting a service to transmit your hard-earned money, and receive the hard-won money you need to trust it.

The first online wallet was invented in 1979 and used the forerunner of the internet: communicating via TV networks and phone lines. This first system was launched in the UK in 1980, a system of payment processing that worked in closed networks for businesses. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee set up the first WWW server, accessed by a browser and the World Wide Web we know, love and gamble on (and which you’re reading this on) was launched. It was only a year later that the first business started to be done online. In 1994 online banking was pioneered, and lucky Web users could order a pizza. Thanks to the invention of SSL encryption they could do so in relative security, and in 1995 Jeff Bezos started stacking books in his garage and the Amazon website started processing the orders. For most of the time since then, people have been trying to improve payment systems.

Back in those early days, a series of online wallets were invented, but they never took off, largely because no-one really knew about them and they never made the vital breakthrough that modern processors have. The first online wallets simply stored payment card details for use online and verified their safety. They were usually linked to a single company so weren’t very flexible. We mourn their passing and thank them for the sacrifices that they made in developing the great online payment systems we now have.

Modern Digital Wallets

Today we have much more developed systems. And they’re getting even more sophisticated and easier to use. The growth of mobiles as the main engine of Internet action will only speed up this trend. Technology in payments is improving everywhere. Across Europe, shoppers are used to tapping a payment card or phone onto a reader to pay in shops. They expect the same sort of speed and convenience online, but also want the security they can enjoy by putting their card or phone back in their pocket or wallet. Online that increasingly means a digital wallet of some sort. The Apple Pay system is an example of a system that crosses this on- off-line divide, and increasingly this is a service that customers enjoy from digital wallets.

PayPal: The First Modern Digital Wallet

PayPal was the first modern digital wallet, and it was built for a specific purpose and, in fact, a specific site: eBay. The company was founded in 1998, but didn’t start offering payment processing or money transfers until the following year, and only after merging with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000 did it take on the name we now know and really kick into gear. In 2002 it was bought by eBay and valued at $1.5 billion. The lads who are now known as the PayPal Mafia (for their outsized and frankly troubling political influence) had hit on something very special. PayPal was used in seven out of 10 eBay auctions and by the majority of users, seeing off a load of competitors.

But the company – while well on the way to becoming the first universally known online wallet – was struggling to find its way outside the site that owned it. They kept adding extra features and better services and partnered with MasterCard to allow PayPal users to go anywhere and pay from anywhere with a single-use MasterCard transaction. In 2007 PayPal made $1.8 billion. By 2010 they crossed the 100 million active account line and were working in 25 currencies. This was a genuinely global company. In 2015, PayPal returned to independence, leaving eBay. The company also launched a personal function called PayPal.Me.

PayPal V Gambling

This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with the world of online casino gambling? A hell of a lot. Firstly, PayPal is a great example of an online digital wallet. It stands in for your bank in many ways. And PayPal has an interesting relationship with gambling that is very important for why we’re even preparing this Skrill casino gambling guide. Because PayPal shut down its gambling business in 2003.

When PayPal did it it was the far and away biggest payment processor in the online gambling business and had it not done so it’s very likely that it would now be so dominant that you wouldn’t have very much choice at all. PayPal did this to protect itself in the United States. America has odd gambling laws, and they have collided with the global internet in interesting ways. The reason why Las Vegas (and to a lesser extent Reno and Atlantic City) are such odd cities is that gambling is pretty much illegal everywhere else. There are other odd anomalies in US gambling law, like the Native American casinos, and Donald Trump being so phenomenally bad at business that he built a gigantic casino RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO ONE HE ALREADY OWNED so that the customers from the old one went to the new one. Genius. But US gambling law is puritanical by European standards and PayPal feared the consequences as US legislators slowly caught up with the explosion of online gambling that was allowing Americans to gamble as much as they damn well pleased (which turned out to be a hell of a lot).

It’s a shame really. Whatever your views on gambling, its roll in American life is most famously as the driving force behind the growth and influence of organised crime. But who are we to tell the Americans how to govern themselves. They do it so well. PayPal are now back in the gambling business and have been busily processing payments for online casino sites since 2010. But in that seven-year space jumped a load of other companies. They include our friends Skrill!

Skrill Casino Gambling: The Basics

Skrill is a UK company. Previously it was known as Moneybookers, and the full current name is Skrill Limited, which is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and licensed by them to run their services in the EEA (the European Economic Area). Skrill is now owned by Paysafe Group. Remember what we said earlier about PayPal’s disappearance from the online gambling market being great news for diversity in the market? Well, here is a good example of what we are talking about. For all the talk of competition driving great service, the truth of capitalism is that it naturally rewards the richest and most powerful, and naturally drives towards monopolies of one sort or another. And this is what is happening here. Skrill are owned by PaySafe Group, who also own one of Skrill’s biggest “competitors” Neteller. And who also own a competitor that is no longer around called Paysafecard. So this is mixed news for customers.

Online safety is something we sometimes joke about here, but in reality, it is deadly serious. Having the password to your online digital wallet stolen could have really terrible consequences. If there is one place you need to take your online security seriously it is around your online digital wallet. So having regulation from the UK’s FCA is a fantastic plus. The UK might have bafflingly stupid politics at the moment, but its financial services (one of the reasons for the bafflingly stupid politics by the way) are world-class, and the FCA is a good regulator. But if you’re expecting Skrill and Neteller to be at each other’s throats desperately cutting prices and improving services in order to get your business. Well. . . Perhaps they are…

History of Skrill

Skrill was initially something of a bargain-basement company. Its business was offering money transfers and doing so more cheaply than anyone else did. The company – as Moneybookers – was founded in 2001 in the UK. In 2007 Investcorp (they sound friendly!) bought the company for €105 million and two years later they offered it for sale for £365 million. By 2011 – as well as making enormous piles of cash for their owners and investors – Moneybookers was being used by 25 million customers, with more than 100,000 businesses taking their payments, including eBay (remember them!), Facebook and Skype. It was around this time that Moneybookers was dropped and the name Skrill was introduced. By 2013, the death of Moneybookers and the birth of Skrill was complete. This company bought Paysafecard in February 2013. And just seven months later another investment company (CVC Capital Partners) bough the lot for €600 million. A couple of years later, Neteller entered the picture, when its parent company, Optimal Payments bought the Skrill Group for €1.1 billon. (We hope you’re enjoying your gambling because someone is certainly making a lot of money out of all of this.) Before the deal was completed Skrill had snapped up another online payment group, Ukash, and merged them with Paysafecard – their competitor.

Skrill and Gambling

Skrill is a gambling favourite. And there are plenty of Skrill online casinos accepting Skrill casino deposits these days. The company’s own publicity makes it clear why this might be: They say: they offer fast service, their service is smart, and they’re discreet. They also promote the fact that you can get exclusive promos in online casinos, online bookmakers, and online poker rooms that accept Skrill. And, they promote the fact that they are now easy to use desktop computers, mobiles, and tablet devices.

There’s also a VIP programme with cheaper fees, more support and the like. One of the high rollers. All these are great things for gamblers to have. Perhaps the most important though is the simplest: people trust Skrill, and you can use Skrill at a load of online casino sites. That’s a big deal in a market where people shop around a lot, and a new casino offering a new Skrill casino bonus is only about half-an-hour away from launching. So that FCA regulation and PayPal’s disappearance from the market have made Skrill one of the most commonly seen payment processors at casinos. And that’s how they have the market power to offer their customers special deals. PayPal are still considered a very high-quality processor, and seeing them at a casino is considered a sign of a good operator because the company is still very picky about who it works with. But Skrill is up there for quality and much more common.

Things got even better for Skrill gamblers in 2014 when those odd American laws got a brush-up. New Jersey is home to some legal, real-world gambling in the casinos of Atlantic City, and it was the first state to start to offer legal online gambling too. (Legally, the picture in America remains complex, but it is likely that cases in the Supreme Court will see gambling fully legalised online, and perhaps as result liberalised offline too.) When New Jersey allowed some online gambling payments they picked one online digital wallet as their first sanctioned and regulated partner. This was Skrill, and this was great news for the company. In just about the toughest jurisdiction in the world they’d managed to get the nod.

Setting up Your Skrill Account

It doesn’t hurt that it’s easy and completely free, to set up a Skrill casino account. You really might as well do it just in case you need the account. If you never use it, it’s there in case of emergencies. All you need to do is fill in a couple of online forms. And then you can load up your Skrill online casino account by transferring your money in from your bank account, or from a payment or credit card. Alternatively, you can juice yourself up via vouchers with a unique code. Skrill now accepts more than 100 payment methods, including our old pals Paysafecard, which is a way of turning cash into online payments via participating stores. Making a Skrill casino deposit is easy!

Is Skrill Secure to use for Online Casino Gambling?

Remember all that talk about online security we went through above. Well, Skrill scores very highly in this department too. Skrill promises to add “another layer of protection to your financial information”. That’s great news in the online gambling world. Regulation and security has improved vastly in the online casino world, but it is not without its dangers and we urge all our readers to take a few simple precautions to keep themselves safe online. Always play at legal, licensed sites, and work out how you’ll check a site is legitimate and make sure you do it every time you go to a new site. This includes checking out that links to apparent payment partners are legitimate and that any link that takes you to a payment screen is taking you to the correct, fully secure site.

Skrill works by adding a buffer layer between your bank or bank card and the place where the money is going. As long as you have the email address that you opened your account with and a password (which of course you’ve made super long, secure and uncrackable – or you’re using a password locker or other system) you can pay. Your payment card or bank details are never sent to the online casino site. The information that Skrill sends is sent using the best encryption in the business. Google, “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS Level 1)” for more details. Basically, it’s end-to-end encrypted so it’s gibberish if some hacker breaks your connection.

Skrill also offer decent advice on how to stay safe online, and they’re to be congratulated for that. They remind their users to look out for phishing emails and that the company itself will NEVER get in touch to ask for passwords or payment details. You can also use two-factor authentication to add even more security. If you don’t use this already we recommend that you do. All it means is that each time you log into your Skrill account you’ll be texted a unique code that you must input in order to complete any transaction. That means that no-one without your phone can use your account. They use the Google Authenticator system.

Successful Skrill!

Recent (but not completely up-to-date) figures show how well all this work is paying back the Paysafe Group. This showed the massive boost the company had from 2014 to 2015 (remember that date and the New Jersey regulation decision). In 2014 the digital wallet part of the business was taking $89.6 million. The following year there was a nearly 80% rise to $159.1 million.

Your Part of the Bargain: Safe Skrill Casino Gambling

So Skrill are doing a lot of good things for gamblers. You’d do well to check them out. But please don’t think that having a good quality and high-security payment processor and digital wallet solves all the possible problems of online gambling. You still need to take your own security seriously. Make sure you set a very strong password for your Skrill account, and if you can sign up for all their security extras including two-factor authentication. And when you’re out in the big wild world of online casino gambling keep your wits about you.

The commonest victims of scams and fraud are people who are trying to take shortcuts and people who are desperate. The best way to stay safe is to avoid being in those positions. That means taking safe gambling advice seriously because if you get in trouble financially you’re going to be looking for easy answers to hard questions and that’s when you’ll get in trouble. And never try to circumvent licensing or legal restrictions. Scam sites know their most reliable audience is people who want to get around limits on their play. So if you are excluded from a site for personal reasons, because you’re too young, or it’s not licensed for your use then don’t try to break those rules: don’t try to gamble underage, don’t try to gamble in a country where it’s illegal. And don’t gamble at sites that only offer cryptocurrency as a payment option.

Skrill Casino Bonuses and More

Skrill is a great payment system for your online gambling needs. It’s the closest thing to a specialised and exclusive digital wallet that the online gambling world has. That’s why so many Skrill online casinos have special offers for Skrill customers. That in itself is worth opening an account for. The safety, security, expertise and more add layer after layer of recommendation as far as we’re concerned. Start your search for the best Skrill online casinos by looking for great Skrill casino bonuses, good games, and even extra bonuses for Skrill users, and then gamble responsibly and with the peace of mind of a trusted system.